"Livia! We thought you'd been taken like the others."
"No, no ... " She told them of her meeting with Lu-cius slowly and haltingly, because Blockworld kept changing and simplifying her language (instead of "bastards" it had her say "bad guys"). She finally managed to get the chain of events across. "Lucius told me if I didn't stay with him they would attack" which became "beat up on" "the camp. I didn't believe him," she finished. She found she was trembling, whether from relief at finding her people, or anger at Lucius's betrayal, she couldn't tell.
They were all that was left of Westerhaven; they comforted her as best they could until she steadied. Wiping her eyes, she looked around at the stylized landscape. "Qiingi, what is this place?"
He half smiled. "It seems to be a refuge for people with hurt xhants. Your friend Esther found it."
Esther was the last person Livia would have credited with the ability to travel. Yet, here she was, appearing as a tiny girl in a canary-yellow dress.
"Esther! How did you do it?"
"It's just like a place we have in Westerhaven," she said with a shy laugh. "Sometimes babies are born wrong, and sometimes their parents choose not to have them fixed. Then places like this are made for them. Adults have a hard time coming here at all, and if they do they arrive without weapons and without strength. I know this because I have ... well, a cousin." She blushed. "I've been visiting him my whole life. But I never talked about it, you know, in our Society."
Through the awkward interface of Blockworld language, Qiingi explained that it was the Oceanans who had attacked the camp. "They expected us to try to escape by going down to the sea; I took these people up instead. The Oceanans saw and chased us, but I am good in forest paths, and we escaped them. They were sure to find us eventually, though, so we looked for another way. Esther guided us here. I am ... surprised that you found us."
Livia tried to smile. "I ... travel well." lam good at rejecting places would be another way to say it. She understood that now, to her own sorrow.
"But now that we are here," said Qiingi, "where else can we go?"
Livia thought about the sims she'd run and before that, Lucius's assertion that 334O's people were everywhere. She shook her head. "There's only one place we might be safe now. We're going to try to make it to the aerie."
They ate their fill of the overflowing berry bushes. Then they faded into the forest, the ghosts of children leaving home.
It was a relief to be alone. Aaron Varese sat on a small cot in an equally small stone cell, its walls rough-hewn out of asteroidal rock. Rust from iron deposits stained it here and there. Near the small slotlike window, the stone was wet from the permanent mists that hung at the aerie's height When he'd first arrived here, he'd often stepped outside just to admire the slick black surfaces that gleamed like a god's sculpture above and below. Today he simply sat, brooding.
The others were all huddling together, venturing out alone only when they had to. Ever since the general order had gone out that the AI of the Societies was no longer to be trusted, the peers had been miserable in their isolation. Aaron had little time for Societies; he had even less for the real company of his peers right now.
At the moment they were all bickering over the latest news from Westerhaven or more properly, the total lack of news. For the first time in their lives, these young men and women were cut off from the culture and gossip of Westerhaven's social network. They couldn't believe it was happening. Their responses ranged from simple denial to outrageous and suicidal schemes to retake the fallen lands of Teven.
All that filled him with contempt. It brought back memories that he normally tried to suppress. After the death of his parents in the crash, Aaron had sat with Livia for days, waiting for rescue to arrive. It didn't come, and didn't come, and gradually, it began to dawn on him that no one was looking for them. Inscape had crashed in this part of the world and that was such a terrifying prospect that nobody from the outside would risk entering here. He had been abandoned.
He had never
viewed the duels and posturing of the peers with any respect since then. When he'd needed it most, they hadn't been there. He would never forget that. Worse, he saw the same attitude in the endless discussions and lack of action going on around him right now.
Everybody wanted to know what the bizarre invaders these "ancestors" wanted. What were their politics? Were they religious? What scope of freedom would the people of Teven have under their rule?
"Who cares?" Aaron had said again and again. "Catch me one of them so I can find out what technologies they use. That will tell us their true manifold, and it's all we need to know about them." His words hadn't penetrated many of their thick skulls, so now they were engaged in planning some pointless raid into the lowlands thousands of meters below the aerie. It was strategically useless, just a make-work project really.